Caroline Kennedy-Pipe: Professor of conflict

Leeds seems an appropriate place to talk about terrorism. The cell of suicide bombers who wreaked carnage on the London transport system on July 7 2005 included young men brought up in Leeds. They lived a mile or so from where we're sitting now in the lobby of the Queen's Hotel.

Professor Caroline Kennedy-Pipe comes through the revolving doors and past the uniformed flunkeys before perching rather uncertainly on the edge of a luxurious armchair. In truth, we've met here because it's handy for the station. She lives just outside Leeds and she's on her way home from Hull University, where she was recently appointed chair of war studies.

"Caroline is one of the leading experts in the UK and beyond," says Justin Morris, head of politics and international studies at Hull. "She has done policy work for the government here and I think also in the US." Kennedy-Pipe, 46, can't talk about any of that, needless to say, except to confirm that it's true on both counts. But she is happy to discuss her latest transatlantic research project. She's working with Kevin Murphy, a psychologist from Penn State University, along with a team of engineers from the Georgia Institute of Technology, to examine the use of what she calls "IEDs - improvised explosive devices," she explains. "What everybody else calls suicide bombs."

Calling them IEDs, apparently, sounds more scientific and therefore more likely to attract the big bucks that academics need for big investigations. "There's a move to make us social scientists more method-driven," Kennedy-Pipe goes on. She readily concedes, however, that there is no hard-and-fast formula for producing a terrorist. "And you can't interview suicide bombers afterwards to ask why they did it," she points out, grimly. "Their motivations are not always clear, it seems to me."

All the more reason for the need to work across disciplines and search for vital clues, she suggests. "Can we possibly produce a useful model, and would that have any purchase in the real world? IEDs have been one of the primary ways of killing our troops in Iraq. So we need to know more about the kind of people doing this."

Lessons of history

Part of her role will be to analyse how the lessons of history apply to current conflicts. Last year she published her book on The Origins of the Cold War and, 10 years before that, The Origins of the Conflict in Northern Ireland. "I know that Tony Blair made the point that al-Qaida is a very different beast from the IRA," she says. "Well, perhaps so. But there are similarities. The IRA were never the cuddly bunch that some people are now trying to portray them as."

Surely that's because former IRA commanders have become part of the government of Northern Ireland, I suggest. "Exactly. And that tells you how politics changes. I don't want to sound frivolous, but one reason why terrorists eventually become part of the structure that they were trying to destroy is that they get old. They also get defeated." So does she believe that the "war on terror" can succeed? "The war in Ireland eventually showed the IRA that violence wouldn't bring success. The intelligence services had such a stranglehold that terrorists couldn't move about as they had done in the 1970s."

So one of the lessons of history, in the Kennedy-Pipe world view, is the need for patience. Over 40 years before the collapse of the Soviet Union, she points out, the journalist Walter Lipman and the diplomat George Kennan were advocating a policy of containment. Sitting out the cold war, in other words, until the economy of the other side collapsed. "A really confident great power would have sat out 9/11 and realised that the new global pattern of politics has to be adapted to, not by war, but by a series of other methods," she suggests. "Horrific though it was, the 9/11 casualty rate was quite low. I say this with no disrespect intended to the families involved, but you have to ask whether it really warranted unleashing two major wars."

Yes, governments have to be seen to be doing something, she concedes. "But the military option is a blunt one when you're dealing with al-Qaida. You're doing exactly what the terrorists want."

Kennedy-Pipe has a self-effacing manner at odds with her achievements. She is, after all, president and former chair of the British International Studies Association (Bisa). As a woman, what's more, she's something of a rarity in her chosen field. War is seen as a macho subject. In fact, it was two male soldiers who first stirred her interest in military history. One was Harry Hearder, professor of Italian history at Cardiff, who had spent much of the second world war in Italy. The other was Robert O'Neill, professor of war studies at All Souls, Oxford, and a veteran of two tours with the Australian army in Vietnam.

Kennedy-Pipe was brought up just outside Oxford, the daughter of liberal Irish parents - her father ran a small building merchant's. "But I didn't go to the university there until I did my PhD," she explains. "At 18, I wanted to get away and my boyfriend had gone to Cardiff the previous year." Hearder's first-hand experiences of war evidently inspired her. She emerged with a first-class honours degree in history. But why specialise in war? "I knew I wanted to teach, so I thought I might as well teach something important. And when you study history, there's a war in every course. Why does humankind spend so much time developing more effective ways of killing one another? Look at the 20th century: almost in the blink of an eye you've gone from the bayonet to the nuclear warhead."

Terrorism toolkit

And now, in the 21st century, we have increasing numbers of terrorists setting out to blow themselves and others up with IEDs. It just so happens that our meeting at the Queen's Hotel coincides with the government unveiling its "toolkit" for teachers to spot potential violent extremists and report their suspicions to the authorities.

Kennedy-Pipe is not impressed. "It looks to me like another example of government trying to make people think they're doing something effective," she says, "and undermining the compact between teachers and pupils in the process. In my experience, those who are drawn to radicalism are very good at hiding it. This generation is really media-savvy, and there's a link between those looking at internet videos of atrocities against Muslims and their recruitment to al-Qaida. They're aware of global political grievances. And their alienation from mainstream society where they grew up means they feel they have more in common with youth in far-flung corners of the globe. Hence the British young men at training camps in Pakistan. The battlegrounds are far wider than we anticipated before 7/7."

On reflection, perhaps, there's nothing particularly appropriate about discussing terrorism in Leeds. The bombers from just up the road could have come from any town or city in the UK or, indeed, across the world.

Curriculum vitae

Age: 46

Job: Chair of war studies at Hull University

Before that: Professor of international relations and war studies at Warwick